Climategate claims its first big political scalp

Australian conservatives have shown the way by dumping the party leader who was in favour of massive carbon taxes and replacing him with one who stated last month that AGW is "crap."

This makes Malcolm Turnbull, the suddenly-ex-leader of Australia's Liberal party, the first major political victim of the Climategate furore. And his replacement Tony Abbott, the first politician to reap the benefits of the world's growing scepticism towards ManBearPig. Of the three candidates, he was the only one committed to delaying the Australian government's proposed Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).

The trouble began last week when Australia's opposition Liberal party began haemorrhaging frontbenchers, all of them preferring to lose their jobs than be railroaded by their leader into voting with the Government on Kevin Rudd's new carbon tax.

Aussie blog hero Andrew Bolt has the blow-by-blow details. Particularly stirring is his description of how the Liberals' newly elected leader Abbott – the Mad Monk as the libtard MSM is already calling him – takes the floor and tells like it is about the ETS (Australia's equivalent to Cap And Trade).

Already the lines are potent – real fighting words from the Liberals at last: Rudd’s great green tax “is really an energy taxation scheme.” In fact, it is “a $120 billion tax on the Australian public, and that is just for starters.” Power prices will go up, for instance. “We just can’t wave that through the Parliament.”

To the public, Rudd’s scheme is “a great big tax to create a great big slush fund… run by a giant bureaucracy”. Already Rudd has overseen “a waste of money … worse than Whitlam”.

Too bloody right mate! (As they say in Australia where "bloody" isn't a swear word s0 I'm allowed to use it as much as I like.)

Further useful background comes from Watts Up With That, with quotes from Abbott's memoir Battlelines. Here is what he has to say about carbon taxes:

“Without binding universal arrangements, any effort by Australia (on emissions trading) could turn out to be a futile gesture, damaging local industry but making no appreciable dent in global emissions…. Another big problem with any Australian emissions reduction scheme is that it would not make a material difference to atmospheric carbon concentrations unless the big international polluters had similar schemes. Australia accounts for about 1 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions. At recent rates of growth, China’s increase in emissions in about a year could match Australia’s entire carbon dioxide output. Without binding universal arrangements, any effort by Australia could turn out to be a futile gesture, damaging local industry but making no appreciable dent in global emissions.”

And here he is on climate alarmists:

“It’s hard to take climate alarmists all that seriously, though, when they’re as ferociously against the one proven technology that could reduce electricity emissions to zero, nuclear power, as they are in favour of urgent reduction in emissions. For many, reducing emissions is a means to achieving a political objective they could not otherwise gain.”

Sounds a very sensible fellow. We can only hope that other leaders of conservative opposition parties – not naming any names – are listening to him closely.

Update: Australians have been counting the bitter cost of their failure to implement Kyoto, according to Terry McCrann in Australia's Herald Sun. Here he ruminates on the miseries they have suffered by not being more eco-friendly:

A reader with a droll sense of humour has come up with an inspired way to achieve the same environmental effect as Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull's Emissions Trading Scheme, but without the cost.

Simple, a National Apology on Climate Change. Same effect on global emissions as an ETS, but with zero cost.

More humour came less intentionally from an online commentator who set out to detail "What ignoring Kyoto has cost us".

Two things it appears. Living in smaller houses.

Damn, if only we'd adopted Kyoto we could have been living in British-style shoe-boxes. Sorry, 'cosy' cat-friendly accommodations. Cat-friendly? Well, you can't swing …

Secondly, not being serious about Kyoto has condemned us to cheap electricity prices. At least 50 per cent below the rest of the world.

If we'd gone for wind farms, nuclear, solar, etc, we could have had more expensive power over the past dozen or more years.